This is not a macOS issue, it’s an app developer issue. If the app developer likes the behavior that the app still runs after closing the last app window, this is how the app will act. Some newer Apple apps close the application when the window is closed.
So then why is it so common on MacOS?
because that’s how it used to be on older versions of OSX and older Macs. There’s a lot of inertia because launching a program to read files off a disk and load them into memory was more costly timewise in those days so e.g. having Photoshop open and loaded even if you didn’t have a picture open you didn’t want to have to wait for the program to open unless you really were done with photo editing.
I've had this exact experience. I used gnome for just one week before getting a macbook and after 3+ years of MacOS I still its find multi desktop handling absurd and unintuitive.
What makes this worse is that Apple's refusal to expose any public APIs to control workspace behavior so you can't even work around their shitty choices.
Instead of iterating on existing functionality, they launch flashy additions like Stage Manager only to abandon them immediately.
If open windows are bugging you, you can simply move to a new workspace, as you mention. There's a keyboard shortcut, so that's actually very easy to do. Gnome is very different from more common desktop environments, but if you accept to try and work with it the way it's designed, it can be productive and enjoyable.
Doesn’t that bother you? Honest question, as it feels “conceptually dirty”. There is something of “if the room is too messy don’t tidy it, just move to another room” in it that bothers me.
You can tidy it up, but mentally it's that there’s a room for activity X and a different room for activity Y. It’s about this mess over here is unrelated to this mess over here.
Well, I'll do a small experiment, working on my Surface Pro 3 (Yes, you read that right) which I am using as a Thin client to my desktop. Just opened 14 workspace on it. Opened up terminals, text editor, disk usage tool on all the workspace. gnome-shell is sitting on 154mb, and Firefox is 1.7GB. And I am not seeing any unacceptable performance degradation at all. Put them in same workspace, memory usage seemed to inc…
I'm paying attention, and I have respect for the experiment, but something is wrong somewhere. Conceptually I love workspaces, having tried innumerable forms of spatial window management, and I have tried them across multiple OS's and I always run into this problem eventually where the system lags switching between them (despite apparently low resource usage across the board). For some ungodly reason despite the effo…
maybe you’re doing something different from everyone else or your expectations are too high, but three finger swiping to move between spaces on macOS should feel smooth and buttery. There's a 200 millisecond lag after you switch spaces and when your input gets rendered (it starts accepting input in the new space as soon as you switch) that, if you're staring at that and focusing on that, watching it like a hawk, exists, but if you can get over that, Spaces/virtual desktops is a useful feature. The whole screen needing to rerender shouldn't be happening. What apps (or more likely, your IT department) are you running?
I think the above post must refer to how it works in MacOS. In Gnome, the app quits when the last window is closed (by default at least). I guess this is a matter of taste, but personally I strongly dislike the way MacOS works here.
This is not a macOS issue, it’s an app developer issue. If the app developer likes the behavior that the app still runs after closing the last app window, this is how the app will act. Some newer Apple apps close the application when the window is closed.
This is the appropriate behavior if and only if the app has only one “main” window (e.g., System Preferences).
Hey MacOS switchers, welcome. Please know that closing the last window doesn’t quit the application. Quitting the application quits the application. That’s why the icon is still in the dock.
To those who didn’t read the post, I’m reacting to the author’s complaints about how the MacOS dock works, which aren’t actually about how the dock works. (“Hey MacOS switchers [from Windows or GNOME]”)
In fact that’s how it always worked. Apps that don’t work that way, including Apple’s, are “wrong”.
Both behaviors have been common/"correct" as long as I remember. Single window apps such as System Preferences, Disk Utility, etc. don't meaningfully exist without their window and as such they quit when the window closes. Multi-window apps e.g. web browsers, word processors have the "usual" macOS behavior where they can remain running without a window open.
Importantly, both behaviors are correct under the appropriate circumstances (which you described). It’s not random or discretionary.